She was smart and compelling enough to carry the novel. Maggie is a likeable and interesting-enough narrator-again, we’re not expecting high literature here.

This setup has a Shirley Jackson feel to it, and though my Riley Sager ratings have ranged from good to DNF to lukewarm, I was more than ready to give this one a try. I’m all about spooky, and the only supernatural creatures I’ll tolerate are ghosts. However! Not every book we read needs to make us smarter or better people. Riley Sager books are not exactly intellectually challenging, and they’re not great literature by any stretch. So I was deliberate in picking a book I knew would keep me entertained. My phone is a constant distraction, work hours bleed into the night, I wander around obsessively taking walks and running instead of sitting down, I have no commute, it’s too hot to take a bath…so many excuses. Throughout shelter in place, it hasn’t always been easy to focus on books. Review: Sometimes, you just need a good murder plot to keep you reading. As Maggie experiences strange occurrences straight out of her father's book, she starts to believe that what he wrote was more fact than fiction.Īlternating between Maggie's uneasy homecoming and chapters from her father's book, Home Before Dark is the story of a house with long-buried secrets and a woman's quest to uncover them-even if the truth is far more terrifying than any haunting.-Dutton Books Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself-a place filled with relics from another era that hint at a history of dark deeds.

And locals aren't thrilled that their small town has been made infamous thanks to Maggie's father. People from the past, chronicled in House of Horrors, lurk in the shadows. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father's death, she returns to renovate the place to prepare it for sale. But she also doesn't believe a word of it.

Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father's book. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity-and skepticism. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. Synopsis: What was it like? Living in that house.

Lock every door riley sager summary